Tourist trip design with heterogeneous preferences, transport mode selection and environmental considerations

Tourism is one of the fastest-growing sectors in the world with a shift from mass tourism to personalized travel. Nevertheless, it generates significant environmental impacts. The current events associated with quarantine measures generated by COVID-19 represent, however, a risk for this sector. It is hence necessary to create strategies that allow efficient decision-making for all echelons and actors for a rapid recovery. Tourists are key actors, which makes necessary to facilitate tourism trip planning according to tourists' preferences as a complex process. In this paper, we propose a novel model of tourist trip planning for heterogeneous preferences in a tourist group and selection of transport modes, in the first instance, while a second step seeks at minimizing the level of CO₂ emissions. A comparison of the two models is made considering the objectives associated with individual tourist benefits and group profit equity, in contrast to the inclusion of the cost of CO₂ emissions. A numerical comparison is carried out with a total of 546 data sets. Results illustrate the conflict between those objectives by generating an inverse relationship between the individual and group profit equity of tourists, in addition to individual benefit and emission minimization.